The UNEXPLAINED Mysteries of Mind Space and Time

The Phantom Universe

There seems to be no place for 'common sense' in the bizarre new scientific theories of the 20th century. ARCHIE ROY describes the world of modern physics, where time flows at varying rates or even goes backwards, and where matter and antimatter are in constant flux THE LATE-VICTORIAN MODEL of the Universe seemed a steady, reliable and enduring construction. Yet within half a century it was shattered by quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. The first suspicions that nature was not as it had seemed came when the Michelson-Morley experiment failed in its attempt to detect the Earth's movement through the luminiferous ether (see page 801). The physicists Hendrik Lorentz and G. F. Fitzgerald suggested an explanation: physical objects had sizes that depended on their speeds - a moving object shrank in the direction of its motion. They also postulated that the measurement of the passage of time by a clock depended likewise on the clock's velocity. The expression 'time flies' took on quite a different meaning! They suggested that the Michelson-Morley null result could be explained by such changes in the measuring apparatus. Lorentz gave a special mathematical expression that related the space and time measurements made by a moving observer to those made by an observer at rest. Speeds in Man's everyday life are very small with respect to the velocity of light - which is 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometres per second) - and so these effects would be unnoticeable. But if light travelled at the speed of, say, a racing car, then even in past centuries people might have taken it as quite normal for arrows and cannonballs to shorten perceptibly in the direction of travel, regaining their former length when they stopped, and for a clock's hands to turn more slowly while it was moving. Some of Lorentz's ideas appeared, in a different form, in Einstein's theory of relativity, published in 1905. But Einstein went further by denying any distinction between moving and stationary objects. An observer in a high-speed rocket would see an apparent shortening of 'stationary' objects and a slowing down of 'stationary' clocks, just as observers on Earth would see these changes in him and in the rocket. Einstein showed that this curious velocity effect also altered the mass of an object. As its velocity increased, its mass increased, making the object harder to accelerate. As its speed approached the velocity of light, the mass became enormous. Einstein obtained the result that the velocity of light was a limit that no physical object could reach. Nowadays, physicists are able to accelerate charged particles to within a few per cent of this velocity, at which speeds their masses are observed to be many times their rest mass. In addition, Einstein assumed that the velocity of light as measured by any observer was a fixed quantity, no matter at what speed the observer moved. This again was contrary to common sense. If two cars. each travelling at 50 miles per hour (80 km/h) as measured by a stationary observer, are approaching each other, we would expect that an observer in one of the cars would see the other as approaching at 100 miles per hour (160 km/h). In fact, as Einstein showed, the relative speed is actually less than this by an infinitesimal amount (see page 42). Above: Hermann Minkowski, who conceived 'spacetime' Furthermore, if the cars were beams of light, and the speed of light were only 50 miles per hour (80 km/h), then a measurement of its speed would always give that result no matter what the speed of the observer. In essence, he would be carrying out Michelson and Morley's experiment, and finding what they found - that no variation in the speed of light is detectable. Treating space and time as separate and independent quantities was now shown to be mistaken. In 1908 Hermann Minkowski suggested that the concept of 'spacetime' could be used to remove the barriers to our acceptance of such strange effects as these changes in time and size. He claimed: Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality. In Minkowski's conception the Universe is represented as having four dimensions: the three dimensions of space - length, breadth and width - and the dimension of time. The history of a body (a human being, a picture, anything) is represented by a 'world line', mapping its course through space and time from its creation to its dissolution. There is no movement or change in this representation of the Universe. Past, present and future are introduced by human consciousness. The slice of spacetime consciously perceived defines the present moment for the observer. Some theorists have supposed that consciousness travels like a tiny point of light along the observer's world line. Although the four-dimensional block Universe is static and unchanging, he is under the illusion that 'things happen' - rather like the illusion experienced by a driver at night when trees that are actually static seem to appear in the headlamp's beam, rush past and disappear. Below: a snooker game, shown in 'snapshots' (left), from the bottom upwards, and in spacetime (right), in which the vertical dimension represents time. Each object's history is shown by its 'world line' On closer examination this model of space, time and consciousness reveals difficulties, but it remains useful when paranormal phenomena relating to time and consciousness are studied, if only to help the theorist break free from common-sense conceptions or prejudices about such matters. Into the atom After the theories of Einstein and Minkowski, still worse assaults on common sense were to follow. J. J. Thomson showed that the electron was an entity with less than a thousandth of the mass of the hydrogen atom. Other experimenters discovered the proton and the neutron. Both had essentially the same mass as a hydrogen atom but, whereas the proton carried a charge equal to that of the electron but of opposite sign, the neutron was electrically neutral. Ernest Rutherford postulated that every atom consisted of a nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by a screen of electrons, held in orbit by the attractive force between their negative electrical charges and the protons' positive charges. The electrons circled the nucleus like miniature planets moving round a miniature Sun. Like our solar system, the atom now became largely composed of nothing. If it had been a sphere the size of the Earth, then the nucleus would be a cathedral at its centre, circled by electrons the size of bungalows. Above: Niels Bohr proposed in 1913 that in the atom only certain orbits are 'allowed' for electrons a restriction that could not then be explained But the Danish theorist Niels Bohr went further. To any orbital radius there corresponded an energy level. Using the long-established idea that in atomic processes energy comes in multiples of a basic energy unit, the 'quantum', he showed that only certain orbits were possible for the electrons in atoms. But the theory gave little insight as to why such limitations should exist in nature. Furthermore, electrons apparently jumped from one orbit to another instantaneously. But even though the theory's assumptions seemed against all common sense, it became accepted because it worked. Other researchers were now demonstrating additional strange features of these subatomic particles. When an electron collided with another atomic particle, it behaved like a tiny cannonball, but in other experiments electrons behaved as if they were made up of waves, as light is.The electron could equally well be regarded as a wave or as a particle. Sir William Bragg quipped: 'Electrons seem to be waves on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and particles on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.' Perhaps on Sundays they took the day off to recover from their Jekyll and Hyde transformations. Left: the atom, once thought to be indivisible, has a complex structure. Swarms of electrons, carrying negative electric charge, circle a heavy nucleus consisting of positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons. The electrons follow orbits grouped in 'shells', and are responsible for the atom's chemical properties This dual quality of the particles of nature is recognised in Bohr's principle of complementarity: The concept of complementarity is meant to describe a situation in which we can look at one and the same event through two different frames of reference. These two frames mutually exclude each other, and only the juxtaposition of these contradictory frames provides an exhaustive view of the appearances of the phenomena. Bohr cited many examples of complementary relationships among ideas from outside physics: for example, moral judgement and psychological explanation of human actions may be mutually incompatible, yet equally necessary to give a full picture of them. Later we shall discover that the principle of complementarity can be usefully applied to the world of paranormal phenomena. Werner Heisenberg, who had made crucial contributions to the task of replacing the 19th century's conception of a hard, material Universe by the insubstantial world-web of 20th-century theoretical physics, stated his principle of indeterminacy: that for subatomic entities it is impossible to know their position and velocity simultaneously and exactly. Since subatomic particles are wave-like it is not possible to talk about position in any precise fashion. In fact the equations of theoretical physics refer merely to possibilities or probabilities, not to facts. Henry Margenau said of them: The equations say nothing about masses moving; they regulate the behaviour of very abstract fields, certainly in many cases non-material fields. This field theory implies that matter is composed of wave-like processes, that the seemingly solid material Universe perceived by our physical senses is an illusion. In addition, the seeming separateness of objects within that Universe is also an illusion. On the subatomic scale. there are no 'objects' of invariant 'mass' and given 'volume' separated by 'distances' and acting on each other with 'forces' of the simple push-pull type of mechanics. The entity we conveniently call an electron has no definite position at a given time. no definite velocity and no isolation from the rest of the Universe. Quantum theory states that. whatever location is specified. there is a small but finite probability of the electron being there. It, and every other subatomic particle, is in some wav related to every part of the Universe. A crisis of identity One of the triumphs of 19th-century science was the demonstration that light consists of waves. These were explained as consisting of fluctuations in electric and magnetic fields, and their wave-lengths were accurately measured. But although the evidence for this view was overwhelming, it could not explain the fact that light waves can knock electrons out of atoms (below right). This 'photoelectric' effect is used in photographers' light meters - the electrons ejected by the light form an electric current, the strength of which indicates the intensity of the light. Even an extremely faint light can eject electrons - a fact baffling to physicists. Albert Einstein, in the same year that he proposed the theory of relativity, suggested that light behaves in this experiment as if consisting of a stream of particle-like 'photons'. This picture accounts for the behaviour of light in some experiments, while in others the wave picture must be used. The same ambiguity was discovered in what had been regarded simply as particles. The fact that electrons can sometimes behave like waves was demonstrated in 1926. Like the photoelectric effect, this phenomenon has practical uses. One type of electron microscope (above) uses a beam of electrons like a beam of light, focusing it and forming images of an object, such as that of the water flea (above left). The wavelength of the electrons is so short that they can reveal details hundreds of times smaller than those that can be seen with a light microscope. Instinctively we react to these ideas by assuming that the uncertainty in our knowledge of position, velocity, and so on is simply due to the imprecision of our measurements. But this is not so. The uncertainty is built into the microworld because of the nature of subatomic particles. In countless experiments every day, mass is transformed into energy and vice versa; streams of neutrinos (particles that have no mass, no electric charge, no magnetic field), travelling from remote regions of space, pass through the 'solid' Earth, as if the planet were a ghost; experimenters work with 'anti-matter' particles, the mirror opposites of the particles of the everyday Universe. A collision on the subatomic scale. The picture shows events in a bubble chamber, a tank filled with liquid hydrogen. A pion, a short-lived particle, enters at left. The hydrogen boils along its path, leaving a track of tiny bubbles. The pion strikes a hydrogen atom's nucleus, consisting of a single proton, which disintegrates to produce a cascade of particles. Their properties are revealed by the length, thickness and curvature of their paths The existence of one such antimatter particle, the positron, was predicted by the British theorist P. A. M. Dirac in 1931 and confirmed experimentally in 1932 by Carl Anderson. It has the same mass as an electron but is of opposite electric charge. When it meets an electron, both are annihilated, resulting in the creation of high-energy gamma rays. 'I'he physicist Richard Feynman proposed that the positron was an electron but an electron moving backwards in time. Certainly the mathematical theory suggested that if an electron could do this it would behave in experiments exactly like a positron. Feynman went further, suggesting that all antimatter particles were ordinary particles travelling backwards in time. Dirac had been led to his prediction from his study of the solutions of the quantum-mechanical equations that he himself had proposed. For every solution he found describing an electron of given energy, there was another one predicting an electron with negative energy of equal amount - no matter how large. But if these negative energy states existed, why did electrons not fall into these bottomless pits of negative energy, causing atoms to collapse and the Universe to be annihilated in one blaze of radiation? Dirac suggested that all the negative energy states were already occupied by an infinite 'sea' of electrons. Now Pauli's 'exclusion principle' states that two electrons cannot occupy the same energy niche; so, with all possible negative energy states filled, ordinary electrons are kept in existence. Below: P.A. M. Dirac suggested the existence of a sea' of unperceived electrons of negative energy (left). Ordinary electrons have positive energy. A photon of very high energy can knock an electron from the 'sea' (right). The electron appears to be created, together with a 'hole' in the sea an anti~electron, or positron Normally this infinite electron 'sea' is no more perceptible in atomic processes than the air around us is perceptible to our senses On occasion, however, a negative-energy electron can acquire enough energy to climb out of its 'hole' in Dirac's sea. To the observer it then simply materialises as an ordinary electron. But the hole in the sea also becomes manifest, as an electron of positive electric charge - the anti-particle that Dirac had predicted, the positron. Such paradoxical concepts have given Man the insight to manipulate the microworld, split the atom and, ultimately, create nuclear power stations. Emulating the legendary Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven, he now attempts in his fusion experiments to bring down to Earth the energy-releasing processes of the stars themselves. Some parapsychologists hope that our modern quantum-mechanical understanding of the Universe will inspire similarly fruitful theories in the equally strange field of the paranormal. On page 894: the uncanny resemblance between the theories of modern science and the claims of the psychics and mystics

Reproduced from THE UNEXPLAINED p854